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The obvious characteristics that distinguished Japan’s modern museums from older indigenous practices are permanent space, comprehensive collections, and a viewing public. While the pivotal research on the state-centric practice of “show and tell” has been conducted by scholars such as Satō Dōshin, Christine Guth, and Alice Tseng, Noriko Aso focuses on the discursive formation of museum-going publics within broader developments of exhibiting institutions. Tellingly, she opens the book with an illustration of museum visitors at the Tokyo Imperial Household Museum in 1940. Rather than showing a museum building or arrays of artifacts on display, this sketch vividly illustrates Aso’s argument… Full Review

Working Conditions, the recent volume of Hans Haacke’s collected writings edited by Alexander Alberro, reveals the artist’s preoccupation with a handful of concepts since the late 1960s. Chief among these are the ideological structures that govern a culture’s understanding of art; the mechanisms of the “consciousness industry,” of which the art world is a small but relevant element; and, more specifically, the ways in which governments, corporations, museums, and other institutional structures affect the lives of those involved—which is to say, everyone who is affected by those institutions (which is to say, everyone). The book sheds light on how… Full Review

Consider some iconic Frank Lloyd Wright buildings. Many of them are set in rural environments. Fallingwater is embedded in a dense forest in the secluded southwest corner of Pennsylvania. Taliesin (East) overlooks a lush green landscape fed by tributaries of the Wisconsin River. Taliesin West sits on the dusty foothills of the Tonto National Forest outside Scottsdale, Arizona. Moreover, the design of these buildings seems to reflect and harmonize with their natural environment. They are consciously rural—almost anti-urban—styles. And this sentiment, suggested by Wright himself, has guided Frank Lloyd Wright scholarship since he was alive. Upon his death in 1959… Full Review

The works of art commissioned by ancient Maya royal courts captivate and confound. Hieroglyphic captions accompany images of kings, queens, and noble families, but ancient voices on gods, the cosmos, and epic heroes are idiosyncratic at best, opaque at worst. Intuition guided early scholarly interpretations, buttressed by colonial texts, such as the sixteenth-century K’iche Maya Popol Vuh, which seemingly held a wealth of analogous descriptions for colorful Classic-period (ca. 250–900 CE) characters. As decipherment has progressed in recent years, a clearer vision of Precolumbian Maya thought became possible, but considerable insights can still be gained from later stories on the… Full Review

Why is queer feminism not an established subdiscipline in art history or a more influential politic in curating, art criticism, or visual theory? Otherwise: Imagining Queer Feminist Art Histories, edited by Amelia Jones and Erin Silver, begins to answer these questions and to identify the problems this absence occasions or exacerbates. Twenty chapters by artists, scholars, and curators of different generations are framed by an introduction by Jones, an epilogue by Silver, and a first chapter coauthored by both that offers a genealogy of feminist and queer theory and activism in the Euro-American context from the mid-twentieth century to… Full Review

Since the glaciers of the last ice age receded, 11,700 years ago, humanity has lived under the stable climatic conditions of the geologic epoch known as the Holocene. Agriculture flourished during this period, and sedentary societies sprouted up around the globe. Yet a growing number of scientists contend that human-induced alterations to the biosphere, beginning with the invention of the coal-fired steam engine in the eighteenth century and accelerating through the atomic age, have brought the period to a close. Two centuries of burning fossil fuels, razing forests, and dropping bombs have transformed the earth so profoundly that humans no… Full Review

Margaret MacNamidhe’s Delacroix and His Forgotten World: The Origins of Romantic Painting seeks to revise the narrative of Romantic history painting in France by ascribing to the Salon of 1824 a much more transformative role than it has played in previous art historical accounts. MacNamidhe argues that the art criticism that the Salon of 1824 generated, not only regarding Eugène Delacroix’s provocative entry Scenes from the Massacres at Chios: Greek Families Awaiting Death or Slavery, etc. but also acclaimed paintings that have now fallen in oblivion, including Xavier Sigalon’s Locusta, Giving Narcissus a Poison Destined for Britannicus, Tests It on… Full Review

“It would be a mistake to emphasize only the socio-political determinants of mass emigration and not to fully understand the actual aims of individual artists who left their countries of origin simply to fulfill their artistic ambitions abroad. We should also recognise the peculiarity of these ambitions, which are not fulfilled merely by a success in the market-place but by the artist’s entry into the history of art.” —Rasheed Araeen, The Other Story: Afro-Asian Artists in Post-war Britain (London: South Bank Centre, 1989) Sophie Orlando’s British Black Art: Debates on Western Art History makes an important contribution to the story… Full Review

Albrecht Dürer’s importance rests on many factors besides artistry. His capabilities as draftsman and storyteller, his gift for absorbing foreign artistic styles, and all the ineffables he termed ingenium: these would have been capabilities appreciated only in Nuremberg and the vicinity had there not been a new technology for broadcasting talent. It was perhaps market saturation that led Dürer to printing. Nuremberg had enough painters to meet its needs. But already in Michael Wolgemut’s shop, where as painter’s apprentice he made book illustrations, and through the achievements of Martin Schongauer and Andrea Mantegna, Dürer recognized how printing could multiply… Full Review

A book-length scholarly work on architecture on the African continent is so rare that a new publication is cause for celebration in the small community of scholars who study this topic. Michelle Apotsos’s in-depth, diachronic study of architecture in the Islamic community of Larabanga in northern Ghana fits the bill. The book accomplishes multiple tasks. It reconstructs the history of Larabanga as a seat of Islam in the West African savanna—including the history of its dominant ethnic group, the Kamara—and traces the simultaneous emergence of an architectural idiom that embodied the town’s unique identity. In the process, Apotsos also writes… Full Review